Spring Break!

I had a list a mile long of things I wanted to accomplish during spring break.  Not surprisingly, I only checked off a fraction of the items. But, I still feel satisfied at what I DID get done. I finished the sugar egg project. So many little sugar eggs.....I gave one to each of my Primary children and I will give one to each of the three sisters I minister to.  I am planning to give the large panorama egg to Alice and Ivan.

I tackled my scrapbook project - all of 2023 and Christmas of 2023 - and got all the artifacts into the binders and ordered the appropriate photos. I do think 2024 might be my last year to actually past things in a scrapbook since all the photos are in my Lamb-e-umptum books that I print every year. I might just save the programs of concerts I am actually involved in and that's it. Because, I doubt any of my children will be keen on saving the scrapbooks after I have passed....

I took down St. Patrick's Day decorations and put up Easter stuff on Monday.

I had hoped to get a lot of yard work done but it was just too cold to want to go out and do anything.  I did go to Lowes and purchase 36 cinderblocks for a second raised vegetable bed and, over three days, I hauled them in the Element back home - twelve at a time. The folks at Lowes were so helpful in loading them in the car and Steve helped me get them out and placed in the back yard. I am also grateful that Lowes is very close to home.

I still had my music students to teach during the and civic orchestra rehearsal to attend Tuesday night. While there, I learned of a free performance of Vivaldi Four Seasons at a church in Clayton on Wednesday night so I decided to attend.  I have played the music (a somewhat simpler arrangement) with Prairie Strings but I had never heard it performed live by a professional ensemble.  The soloist is the concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra and he was accompanied by musicians from the St Louis Symphony. It was top notch!  Here I am with Jayne and Nancy, two fellow cellists in the civic orchestra.

I met with my friend, Karen Bazdresch, Wednesday morning and we tried our hands at felting. We each bought kits and she made a penguin and I a little white bird for our first attempts. I don't have a photo but I am excited about the possibilities of this craft - particularly for bird Christmas ornaments.

Steve and I watched both Ghostbusters I and II this week (he had not seen either one!) and we watched the 1994 Three Musketeers with Elise last night. Steve hadn't seen it, either, even though we had it on VHS and the kids and I watched it several times.  With the re-watch, I was more aware of the sexual undertones, even for a Disney film, and I checked out the plot for the novel on Wikipedia and it looks like it was greatly toned down for the movie! So, I probably won't be reading the book anytime soon.

The big focus this week has been getting ready for the Lamb of God performance this evening. Our dress rehearsal yesterday morning was kind of a train wreck so I hope we do MUCH better tonight. This is the reason Elise is visiting this weekend, so she can attend the performance and see me play string bass and hear Emily sing the part of Mary Magdalene.

I need to eat dinner and get ready to leave so I will close with more spring flower photos from our front yard.

 

All good things

I meant to post these three photos earlier last week but life just took over...They are my front yard flowers I mentioned in last week's post...

I enjoyed my first free Monday morning in two months (yay for Ramadan) prepping sugar Easter eggs to make with the grandkids on Friday evening.  

Wednesday morning, I played "hookie" from my strings classes (I rescheduled them for early May) and Steve and I joined Emily at Crestview Middle School to listen to Lucy perform in her orchestra. It was fun to hear her group play so well. Lucy is not actually seen in the photo below but she is located somewhere by the conductor's left arm....(a fun fact is that I went to MU with her teacher, Michael Blackwood)

After the performance, Steve and I joined Emily on a visit to the Shaw Nature Preserve to admire the thousands of daffodils.

There is a children's play area at Shaw and I thought the tree creatures shown below were kind of charming (and maybe a bit creepy)

Wednesday evening we invited soon-to-be-leaving senior missionary couple, the Houles, over for dinner.  Steve grilled pork steaks and, being from Utah, they had never eaten a pork steaks. I also made a gluten-free coconut cream pie to enjoy then and again on Thursday, which was pi day.

Thursday morning, Steve and I took Fred Olver and Sam Carpintero with us to our bank to have our updated wills notarized.  Weather that day was fairly unsettled - I had to deal with a tornado warning at my morning strings class - and, by afternoon, there were tornado watches all over the St. Louis area.  We had a teensy bit of marble-sized hail and a lot of rain but nothing else. And, all the weather news pre-empted Jeopardy, Tournament of Champions, darn it! 

Friday after we attended the temple, we went to Southerlands for dinner and piano lessons and to make sugar eggs.

This past weekend was pretty wall-to-wall with working in the temple baptistry Saturday morning, a Lamb of God rehearsal on both Saturday and Sunday afternoons, a ward youth fund raising dinner Saturday evening, and a Relief Society devotional Sunday evening. One happy occurrence out of all those events was lots of yummy gluten-free desserts. There was the coconut cream pie on Wednesday, Steve made mint brownies to take to the Southerlands on Friday and I made Italian cream cake to be auctioned off at the Saturday fundraiser.  I am happy to have leftovers of everything. And, we had delicious corned beef and cabbage for St. Patrick's day lunch. 

This coming week is my spring break and it will end with the Lamb of God performance. All good things to look forward to following a week of all good things....

 

March ramblings

The little apricot tree we planted last year has blossoms!  

And, last night, temperatures dropped low enough that I did this to keep them from freezing.

The daffodils are just going crazy in the back and the crocus are doing the same in the front.  And, my forsythia, which had a rocky start, is also blooming.  The original forsythia plant died the first year but the roots were wick and sent out new shoots the next year.  Yay!

Steve and I got to attend another St. Louis Symphony chamber concert Wednesday evening- this one strongly featured their principal percussionist. It was a lovely night out.

It was spring picture day at two of my schools this past week and almost all the girls came dressed to the NINES!. The result was that they were all pretty distracted so not much actual learning took place. Here are my Trautwein girls posing for me. Interestingly, I have only two boys that I am teaching this semester and they both attend the same school which did NOT have their picture day yet.  I am not sure if I mentioned that my strings class sizes took a significant hit with this second term. While it means less money, it does mean I am teaching kids who are motivated to learn. A happier situation, for sure. The two boys I mentioned are particularly bright and very enjoyable to teach.

Kirsti has become the family bread maker and, while I will probably never attempt gluten-free sourdough bread, she also makes a peasant bread and I was inspired by her when we visited at Christmas. I found a really great gluten-free peasant bread recipe and this is my second successful attempt. I use my two-quart crockpot which accounts for the odd shape and the top doesn't get brown and crispy but the result is extremely tasty, particularly when heated up a bit in the microwave.  

I finally finished my large t-shirt yarn crocheted rug this week.  A big sister to the yellow one I made about four years ago.

We got to watch two movies this week - a serious one on Friday - The Courier - and a light hearted one on Saturday - Clueless.  We were just little kids during the Cuban Missile Crisis but neither Steve nor I remember sensing a lot of fear and worry from our parents.  We do remember bomb drills where we crawled under our school desks with our hands covering our necks and Steve's Cub Scout troop made a visit to a home in the neighborhood that had a bomb shelter in the back yard. Interesting the connection with the two movies - bomb shelters and nuclear threats and Blast From The Past with Alicia Silverstone from Clueless.   

 

Yay for the month of March

I like March!  Even when there is cold and even snow, it never lasts long in March.  We have really had some roller coaster weather this past week.  We broke a record on Tuesday when the thermometer hit 85 degrees!  And, the next day was in the 20's!!!  During the warm days, I was able to trim back most of my perennials.  Then it got too cold so I will have to finish this coming week when it will be warm again. When Steve took Fred to Lowes on Friday to buy some plants, he noticed that there were pots of raspberries for sale (not bare root which is a more common way to get raspberry plants) so we returned Saturday evening after attending a baptism and bought four pots. We ARE going to have a robust raspberry bed someday and hopefully, this year will be when that happens....

Orchestra has new music for the final April concert and it is very difficult!  Notes that look so simple become challenging when they are written in five flats! So, I am buckling down and practicing to get good fingerings.  I went to the first orchestra rehearsal for the Lamb of God that will be performed on Palm Sunday.  It is being performed in the O'Fallon, Illinois stake center and I am participating thanks to Emily who has the solo part of Mary Magdalene.  I have also recruited two other St. Louis South Stake musicians - Brenda on harp and Jared on 2nd violin.  It is a small ensemble but all the musicians are solid and our first rehearsal went well.  It will be very fun to do this performance! Oh, I forgot to mention that I am playing BASS in this orchestra! Thankfully, my part is super easy - mostly the I, IV or V notes of the key with occasional quarter notes. My biggest challenge is remembering I am on bass, not cello, so most of the notes are in different places on the fingerboard.

Only one more week until Ramadan and, although I am not Muslim, Steve and I are involved with the Kindness Begins With Me program that works with Muslims and we will not have classes all during the duration of Ramadan. It will be good to have the break to regroup and rebuild our teaching pool. I have had to teach the teen girls class two weeks now and will again this Thursday because we cannot pin down a teacher.  Sigh!  Below is a photo from the Monday morning women's social gathering.  Here they are doing embroidery during the eleven o'clock  hour.

 

Steve and I had more time for movie/television watching this past week.  Steve caught A Man For All Seasons on Tuesday night while I was at orchestra.  He watched Groundhog Day Thursday night and I saw most of it when I wasn't teaching a cello lesson.  We both watched a frustrating movie on Friday night called An Invisible Sign. Most of the film was very bleak and depressing but then everything was sunshine and roses the last ten minutes.  Really??? On Saturday night, we watched Lady in the Water - a movie I have watched a couple of times but Steve had never seen !! I have a long-term photo album scanning project I am regularly working on and I have discovered I can multi-task and watch something while I scan. So Steve and have watched three episodes of Bull this past week. And, it was fun to see one of the stars of Bull show up in Lady in the Water (the guy with the really strong right arm and the weak left arm).

Happy month of March, everyone!